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Yes, making changes to a poorly optimized site can produce huge gains.

But you still need links to rank for anything worth ranking for.  You cannot discount it.  And I don't think the Client in that article had no external links.

Yes you are correct.

Tell your client to run far.  That SEO has no clue, and is completely wrong.  Maybe he's thinking that out of box Wordpress doesn't have Title or Meta Tag management ?  That's solvable with Wordpress SEO. [highly recommended]

Wordpress outputs HTML.

Another benefit is possibly shorter URLs.

But I prefer the normal approach of example.com/sector/sub-sector/productpage.

For the first site, it took 2 weeks and was successful on the first try.  I know exactly which links were suspect and detailed the removal of the ones under my control and my requests for removal of the others (only about 50% of which were deleted).  I think they considered that I reformed my spamming ways, and so lifted the penalty.

The second site took three separate RRs over a period of about 2 months, each time more links were removed to satisfy them.   The site went from 600 root linking domains to about 150.

Did you loose search positions ?

I think you shouldn't be so concerned by PageRank.  You can be PageRank 6 and still reside on the last page of the search results.   By the time it's updated on the Toolbar, it's already out of date.

Concentrate your site's content.  Obsess over the design.   Is your content and looks better than the competition ?

They won't.  It seems DMCA requests are handled differently for those sites and not counted the same way.

...and even if you were counted, you have to remember this isn't a "penalty".  I don't understand why SEL is calling it a penalty when the official announcement says it'll be one of the 200+ signals.

So I think it's an algo factor.  Just like Site Speed is a factor.   Slow sites still rank today because there's 200+ other factors also being considered.

I've had two different sites recover from manual spam actions.  The first one regained all of it search positions (and even ranks better now) within one week after receiving the "manual spam action - revoked" message.

The second one received the same message, but hasn't been able to regain its rankings.

The difference between them is that first had really good links and some bad ones that Google probably wasn't even counting in the first.  So when the penalty was revoked, the rankings returned as they were before.

The second though had alot of bad links.  Many of those were helping it rank, so when they were removed ...the rankings went with them.   But it was clear that the penalty was lifted at about 10 days after receiving the revoked message.

For WMT, they seem to update "Links to your site" data every 4-5 days.  And when they do, the data is about 10 - 14 days old.

Don't take these times as an indicator for when Google considers a link or not.  It's not kept closely up to date with their index.

Ahrefs/Majestic are pretty fast in my experience.  Sometimes in as little as 1-2 days for links on popular domains.

For OSE, it's once a month.  The last update post says they'll be cutting that time down to weeks -- and eventually more often as they move from amazon to their own hardware.

I'd like to know this as well.

Try this.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-link-diversity

1.  When you change that setting in GWT, it takes a while to have an effect.

2.  You also need to implement a 301 redirect so that plugnbuy.com redirects to www.plugnbuy.com.

I think best practice is to make them "noindex,follow".   You'll still get the warnings in Moz.  They're ok to ignore if you have have noindexed.

I read it a few days ago and I don't disagree with anything in it.

They actually state that PRWeb among the others IS one of those "higher end distribution" service providers that you should be using rather than those free (or cheap) ones that little or no humans will ever read.

Prweb.com.

1. only do it if you have something really newsworthy to publish.  Otherwise, you're wasting your money.

2. don't even try to include a bunch of targeted anchor text everywhere possible.    Less links the better.  The point of the press release isn't to get links from press release sites.

Go to Bing.com

Put:

linkfromdomain:yourwebsite.com

into the search box.

The obvious drawback is that Bing's index isn't very quick to update ...especially for sites with little authority.  But it's still handy for a quick check, rather than crawling the target website.

First look at the Analytics, and try to determine when exactly the drop in traffic happened.  If it coincides with a known panda or penguin update, then you probably found your problem.

If no luck there, I'd do the reconsideration request but don't mention anything about bad links.  You'll get a reply of either "no manual spam actions" or "please remove more bad links and try again"

There are no pros of using article directories.   Short term gains might look like a pro, but they aren't.

Value in these sources of links has gone down over the years, and they'll continue to slide.  A better use of your time might be with publishing a few selective guest posts on related sites.  With regards to your question, use links wherever it feels natural.  If the link is forced or looks out of place, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

...and remember the links you use, don't all have to be pointing to your site alone.

I did a guest post recently which was later re-published on Forbes.  In addition to my own, I linked to two other sites which I was not affiliated with.  One of them emailed me to say thanks and I took the opportunity to ask for a link from his PR6 site which I got.  I emailed the other one, and after several exchanges it was clear that the only thing that moves him to link out is money.  So there ya go.

The only actual link building I do is to focused on building trust and authority for the domain as a whole with the vast majority of 'acquired' links going to the homepage and main categories using anchor text like domain.com, domain, www.domain.com, domain.com - category, http://www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com/category etc, etc, etc.

So besides internal linking, I don't worry about anchor text on incoming links. In time, internal pages begin attracting links on their own ...as it should be.

How long ago was your site established.  Most likely it hasn't been crawled deeply by the mozbot.  You'll have to wait.

Answer: not often enough.

But they are working on fixing on that.